Boys in the Hood

“My Name Is Earl” and “Everybody Hates Chris.”

The sitcom is always being prematurely buried. In the last couple of years, as “Friends” and “Everybody Loves Raymond” departed from the TV landscape, the words heard at the genre’s funeral were alternately “alas” and “good riddance.” (Viewers who need to cling to “Raymond” can still see it in syndication twenty-four hours a day on every channel except CNN.) The supposed remaining bright spot was CBS’s “Two and a Half Men,” a show that seems more dependent than most on the cattle prod of its laugh track, and one that I have watched some two dozen times with a sporting interest: I want to be present when Charlie Sheen demonstrates that he has more than one facial expression. All the death knells faded away, however, when NBC’s “My Name Is Earl” and UPN’s “Everybody Hates Chris” (whose title, of course, deliberately sets the show alongside, yet also very much apart from, Ray Romano’s series) débuted, in September. “Earl” is the most popular new comedy of the season, and “Chris” is seen as a potential crossover hit—meaning that it would be UPN’s first black-oriented show to draw a significant number of white viewers. Apparently, the sitcom, which had been strangled by the kudzulike growth of reality shows, has been reborn.

The success of “Earl” and “Chris,” whether you like the shows or not, is good news for the networks and, more important, for comedy writers, who will probably get more work in the next couple of years than they have since the turn of the century. (It’s especially good news for NBC, which went from first place to fourth among viewers between eighteen and forty-nine last year; in May, the network’s commitments from advertisers for the fall season were reportedly down by almost a billion dollars from the year before.) The aftermath of “Earl” ’s popularity isn’t hard to understand—think of a bunch of lemmings, suddenly realizing that the form they abandoned can make money after all, trying to climb back up the cliff. What’s harder to understand is the popularity itself. It has been attributed to the show’s “quirkiness” and to its untraditional format, but neither of those qualities is anything new. “Arrested Development,” a mostly better and more authentically weird show, has never found much of an audience, though Fox has given it three seasons to do so; the same is true of NBC’s “Scrubs,” which has been around since 2001. (Paradoxically, shows that don’t get great ratings are often left alone during a period of drought; now that the sitcom is back, however, there will be more pressure on comedies to perform well instantly. So all those newly hired writers should also prepare—immediately—to be fired.)

“Earl” had me grinding my teeth from its first image—a bobblehead dashboard figurine. I sensed that I was being handed a big can of whimsy and sent off against my will to camp camp. The cuteness continues in every scene, in every line of dialogue. Jason Lee plays Earl, a sociopathic lowlife who steals at every opportunity. In the voiceover that opens the first episode—a variation of which begins every subsequent episode, too—he says, “You know that guy you see going into the convenience store when you stop off in that little town on the way to Grandma’s house? Sort of shifty-looking fellow who buys a pack of smokes, a couple of Lotto scratchers, and a tallboy at ten in the morning? . . . Well, that guy is me. My name is Earl.” As he speaks, we watch an unsuspecting family—whom we briefly saw in the car with the bobblehead doll, listening to “The Monkey Dance” on the radio—stop at a convenience store; Earl runs to their car and steals a couple of CDs and a small American flag that he finds lying on the floor. Six years ago, Earl’s narration continues, he got drunk and went to Vegas with a woman he had just met, and, when he woke up the next morning, he found himself married to her. As he looks over at her while vomiting into the toilet, he sees for the first time that she is hugely pregnant. You know that show that tries really hard to be quirky and unconventional? The show that winks at all its own jokes and, inevitably, shows someone throwing up into the toilet from the point of view of the toilet? Well, that show is this one. Its name is “My Name Is Earl.”

The premise of the show is that Earl is turning his life around: after winning a hundred thousand dollars in the lottery and losing the ticket, he discovers the concept of karma when he hears Carson Daly talking about it on TV. Earl then makes a list of all the bad things he’s done; one by one, he’s going to go through the list—two hundred and fifty-nine items—and make things right, so that he’ll have a better life. What “Earl” does have going for it is Jason Lee, an amazingly charismatic actor who can charm the blue off your jeans. Lee manages to make selfishness and monomania seem like delightful qualities. He used to be a skateboarder, and although he is now thirty-five and has a receding hairline, he’s lanky and energetic, and he has a killer smile. His first big role was the slacker comic-book collector in the 1995 movie “Mallrats”; even then, he knew how to show a loser’s leadership qualities and give fake sincerity a good name.

But “Earl,” which was created by Greg Garcia, who co-created “Yes, Dear,” an unpleasant traditional sitcom that has somehow chugged along for five years, is a depressing piece of work, as lacking in cleverness as last year’s mystery hit, ABC’s “Desperate Housewives.” “Earl” gets its juice from movies like “Raising Arizona,” “Dumb and Dumber,” and “Me, Myself & Irene”—Earl fathers a black baby, as Jim Carrey’s naïve character did (three times) in “Irene.” And there is more than a whiff of “Mallrats” in the show. The karma thing gets old pretty fast, as does Earl’s insistently genial narration. Maybe some see it as refreshing that Earl is still a jerk even after his epiphany—he busts into people’s houses in order to do the nice thing he needs to do so that he can cross them off his list, and, when he finds out that a guy he used to bully is gay, he runs away in fright. There are some funny moments from other actors, especially Jaime Pressly, as Earl’s venal and sharp-tongued ex-wife, and Ethan Suplee, who plays Earl’s dimwitted brother. But, over all, the show is charmless and patronizing, and as refreshing as dust.

“Everybody Hates Chris,” which was created by Chris Rock and Ali LeRoi, is based on Rock’s boyhood in Bedford-Stuyvesant in the eighties. Tyler James Williams stars as the thirteen-year-old Chris, the eldest of three siblings, and Rock himself narrates the show. Rock hits some of the same notes he does in his stage act, though not with the same ranting intensity; here his observations—about race, about the responsibilities of being a big brother, about navigating his dangerous neighborhood, about his parents—are a little less raw. (In real life, Rock is the oldest of seven.) Chris is a misfit at home and at school; his younger brother is bigger and cooler than he is, and everything his little sister does wrong somehow ends up being his fault, according to his parents. At the school he goes to, which is two buses away—making him a misfit in his neighborhood as well—he is the only black kid.

Williams is a low-key young actor; it’s hard to decide whether he looks thoughtful or just sleepy. He’s not standard-issue cute, in terms of his appearance or his behavior—like a regular adolescent boy, he’s blankish and inward, so it’s believable when his character says and thinks both smart and dumb things. But the most touching aspect of “Chris” is its depiction of the parents, Rochelle (Tichina Arnold) and Julius (Terry Crews). Chris’s mother is a piece of work: a fount of colorful expressions describing what she’ll do to her kids if they don’t behave, and openly proud of her family’s relative prosperity—she’s a “ghetto snob,” Rock says. She also has a temper, quitting jobs right and left without cause. Chris’s father is one of only four fathers on the block. This fact is not just used for one joke and then dispensed with; it’s an integral part of the comedy, as is how hard he has to work to keep the family going. You mostly see him wearing one of two uniforms or his bathrobe; he’s always either at work, getting ready for work, or sleeping between jobs—“a night job and a late-at-night job.” Rock is able to find humor in every aspect of his childhood, and nobody is exempt. While not shying away from the racism he faces at school—the world was not so advanced in 1982 that the school bully was above calling him a nigger—the show doesn’t discriminate. Talking about how much his father needed his rest, Rock says, “Taking sleep from my father was like taking ignorance from a rapper.” ♦